Reviews for Perfect Blue

By CZ

Mimarin is a moderately successful Japanese pop star, famous for her sweet, girlish stage persona. But when she decides to halt her singing career to pursue acting, and tries to recreate herself as a more risqué, more adult performer, many of her fans don't take it well at all. Mima discovers an Internet site, covering her life in obsessive detail and damning the new direction she's taken. A stalker follows her to the set of her new drama, where the thriller plotline slowly begins to intertwine with her own reality to a frightening degree. Fears of failure and the continuing harassment lead Mima to seriously doubt her choices. As her public persona changes, she finds it harder and harder to disassociate herself from it, and her own grip on reality begins to slip. And then people around her start turning up dead. . .

If anyone should contend that animation can't be effective in telling a serious, dramatic story, they should be directed to this film and be advised to brace themselves. "Perfect Blue" is a modern-day thriller that delivers its chills exceptionally well. The twists here come lightning-fast, a cat-and-mouse game between the viewers and the film that so convincingly blurs the lines between Mima's real life and her fictional one, it's soon impossible to tell the difference. The filmmakers deftly play on contemporary fears of media invasion, loss of privacy, and identity theft. We get a look at the darker side of the limelight, where directors and photographers and Mima's own well-meaning agent are the ones who decide how the world sees her, and, eventually, how Mima sees herself.

A film like "Perfect Blue" could have been made in live action, but the animation lends so well to the story, it's hard to imagine it done any other way. Everything depends on a suspension of reality that the medium is surprisingly well-suited for, especially in regards to the more fantastic elements of the film's second and third acts. As she becomes more and more distressed, Mima starts imagining she's being haunted by her old pop star persona, to the point where she actually begins to see physical manifestations of herself. The eerie Mr. Me-Mania, Mima's stalker and number-one fan, is a perfect study of subtle grotesquerie. His is the other life we get a peek into as a counterpoint to Mima's, a portrait of a man who left reality a long time ago. Other characters are similarly true to life, with nods to the sympathetic Rumi and Mima's agent.

Though a little hard to get into at first, "Perfect Blue" really is one of the greats. The fimmaker's weren't afraid of taking some pretty wild chances and the payoff is terrific. Heavy warnings for violence, nudity, adult themes, and intensity. And that goes double for the director's cut.